June 4 marks the 30th anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square, where the People’s Liberation Army killed thousands of students who were protesting how the Chinese Communist Party was running the country. That it was a human rights atrocity is obvious. It was one more deadly incarnation of Mao Tse Tung’s belief that “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

As atrocities go, however, it paled in comparison to the mass murder commited by the Chinese Communist Party and their Red Guards during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), where it is believed that 40 to 70 million people died to remake China into the country we see today.

The difference, of course, was that Tiananmen was in 1989 and America had embraced the People’s Republic and had fully endowed this new relationship with the belief that economic liberalization would lead to political liberalization and democracy was soon to follow.

However hopeful observers may have been, the events in Tiananmen Square demonstrated that the viciousness of the Chinese Communist Party was not about to subside. Talk of democracy and reform was not going to be tolerated including from university students who included, it should be noted, the children of China’s ruling elite. It was a lesson meant to be learned by both the ruling elite and the common people: the Chinese Communist Party was to be put before anything else.